As we look back on 2023, we are reflecting on the topics that have been front of mind for every healthcare professional. For many, 2023 was another year of intense pressure, limited resources, and searching for ways to work more efficiently and improve the patient journey.

Throughout the year, we have considered many of the most significant, complex issues facing the NHS today. From Delayed Transfers of Care to understanding the real cost—and value—of new technology, we have discussed how AI-powered speech recognition can dramatically improve workloads and, ultimately, patient outcomes.

But how much has changed since we first discussed these important topics? And how can speech continue to deliver measurable value to healthcare professionals across every discipline and specialism?

The continued pressure of bed shortages

Back in January 2023, we wrote about the relationship between dwindling bed stocks, high occupancy rates, and Delayed Transfers of Care. Initiatives like the Urgent and Emergency Care Plan laid the foundation for improvement over time, but almost 12 months later, the number of available beds across the NHS remains low.

In December 2023, the NHS Confederation was reportedly ‘worried’ about the continued lack of beds, particularly in Yorkshire and north-east England. With occupancy hitting heights of 95%, Trusts are left exposed to surging flu rates and seasonal illnesses. At the same time, high occupancy also drives infection risk, potentially worsening an already fraught situation.

Speech recognition solutions like Augnito Spectra have a role to play in accelerating safe discharge by reducing internal delays. When clinical workfllows and reporting are fast, flexible and accurate, patients can be safely transferred outside of the NHS, freeing up vital bed space for someone else.

A national emergency for mental healthcare

We also discussed the current state of mental health services in the UK, describing a flashpoint where the available resources need to be rapidly expanded to keep up with surging demand. Sadly, more recent news articles suggest a system that’s perpetually struggling to keep up.

According to The Guardian, the NHS Confederation described mental healthcare in England as a ‘national emergency’ in October 2023. Many NHS leaders observe that mental health has ‘slipped down the government’s set of priorities’, with patients suffering as a result. The situation is similar across the wider UK—in Scotland’s December 2023 budget, mental health funding was cut by almost £30 million.

For mental health professionals (MHPs), new ways of working can enable manual tasks to be completed faster and more flexibly. Crucially, a speech recognition platform, like Augnito, enables MHPs to capture notes in a way that’s natural and intuitive, so more attention can be paid to important patient interactions and those personal, often difficult and emotional conversations.

The continued evolution of patient data

Finally, we looked at patient data in its various formats across 2023. We discussed the importance of interoperability, sharing patient data securely to enable collaboration across multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs). We also tracked the evolution of patient data, including the changing nature of patient records and the heightened importance of accuracy and clarity.

Despite some controversy around privacy, 2024 will undoubtedly see new changes in the way patient data is stored, captured, shared and processed.

Augnito Voice Services and Augnito Spectra will continue to deliver wide-reaching benefits across healthcare with 99.3% accurate, AI-powered transcription that’s available anywhere, on any device. Our aim in 2024 will focus even more on how Augnito modernises the way healthcare professionals report, so, in turn, patient journeys and experiences can be modernised too. All in a single cloud-hosted platform that can be integrated into your EPR system for secure sharing.

Increasingly, patient journeys are becoming digital journeys—and the quality of the data you hold is key.

Learn more about Augnito

See how Augnito Spectra delivers measurable benefits now while future-proofing the way you capture patient data. Request a demo or try Augnito Spectra for 7 days and see the benefits for yourself.

[London, 30 June 2023] – Scribetech has been dramatically expanding its ecosystem of Augnito partnerships and successful integrations in order to empower more healthcare professionals with clinical documentation flexibility and a more efficient way of working.

Efficient clinical speech/voice-to-text digital dictation technology has the potential to improve clinical workflows, reduce delayed patient journeys and enable better informed outcomes. Such technology is only as effective as it is accessible, easy to adopt, easy to integrate, and easy to use.

To this end Scribetech (UK) Ltd, co-creator of Augnito, has invested in a new ecosystem of distributors, value added resellers and integration partners to help bring its AI-powered speech recognition technology to more users across the UK, starting with the new channel’s customers.

In the past three months, companies have been onboarded as distributors for Augnito Spectra – a cloud-based clinical speech recognition solution that supports any English accent, out of the box. This recent UK activity follows successful agreements with resellers in the last quarter. In addition, integration partners including Aptvision, OpenRad and Intelerad have recently integrated Augnito Voice Services into their own radiology reporting platforms, bringing higher levels of accuracy and the time-saving advantage of speech to the systems their respective medical customers already use.

This recent success aligns with Augnito’s sales and development team’s core strategy, reflecting not only a strong 2-year track record in delivering measurable savings and benefits to healthcare, but also reiterating the premier service-oriented heritage it carries from its co-developer’s solution support to the NHS in the last two decades.

More than 12,000 doctors across 355 hospitals and 24 partners in UK, USA, Canada, India, the Middle East and APAC, have signed up to Augnito in just 24 months. They are joined by 1500 radiologists and a growing number of consultants at various NHS Trusts. “Everything comes back to the mission we set out when we launched Augnito in the UK in late 2021,” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito.

“We know that when access to technology is simplified from the ground up, even small increases in performance turn into huge savings. Those savings can be repurposed into what matters most – making healthcare professionals efficient at delivering exceptional care and improving patient outcomes.”

Interoperability and integration are both key to this important goal. Through Augnito Voice Services and a flexible API/SDK, healthcare technology providers can integrate speech recognition into their own platforms in a matter of weeks. To date, Cimar UK, Hexarad, Fujifilm UK Medical Systems and Magentus have all integrated Augnito technology into their radiology systems, enabling efficient workflows for their customers with more accurate diagnostic reporting.

Augnito Spectra gives users constant access to accurate speech recognition and live data input on any device running either Windows or MAC operating systems. This data is then routed securely to clinical systems including PACS and EPRs. Augnito’s ability to fit into existing clinical workflows makes user adoption easier and effective. It reduces both workload management and costs, as well as changing the way providers deploy new technology – ground up vs. top down.

Austin added: “Through our best-in-breed partnerships, we’re introducing real product flexibility and agility to assist medical health professionals in providing better patient journeys. We’ve been proactive in creating more ways to use Augnito, helping us align to the NHS plan for digital transformation and ensure new technology is integrated in a way that will naturally drive user adoption.”

For IT and technology providers in healthcare, Augnito Spectra carries a compelling (up to) 30% profit margin on every UK licence the partner sells. It is designed to be easy and fast to deploy and looks to complement partners’ existing product portfolios and service offerings. For partners’ users, Augnito Spectra provides simpler and more accurate clinical data input into all major EPR systems.

Austin concluded: “We’ve seen significant demand from resellers because the demand is there across healthcare. Inefficiencies and reporting bottlenecks are costing millions of pounds in Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) and bed costs as well as the ever growing patient waiting lists. And with rising demand and intense workloads, everyone inside a Trust knows something needs to change. The healthcare user benefits and the time and financial savings are significant from day one. In fact the cost of Augnito per day is less than a takeaway coffee.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

About Augnito and Scribetech
Augnito is a secure, cloud-based, AI-driven clinical speech recognition product suite. It offers fast, easy ways to capture live clinical data on any device with 99% accuracy, support for multiple medical specialities, and no need for voice profile training. Augnito brings seamless speech recognition to daily workflows and third-party clinical systems, turning medical information into clinical documentation and making healthcare intelligence securely accessible everywhere.

Augnito was co-developed by Scribetech, a clinical voice solutions innovator, fusing 20 years of transcription and digital dictation services to the NHS, speech-to-text, and clinical coding solutions for the healthcare sector, and its own speech recognition engine with advanced voice AI technology.

From GP practices to acute care, hospitals, diagnostics, and imaging, the UK healthcare system is complex for patients and professionals alike. Patient journeys are touched by a vast number of people, all with their own expertise and unique roles to play along the way. In many cases, journeys go beyond the boundaries of the NHS, moving into private healthcare or complementary services like social care.

As a result, there is significant pressure to maintain effective collaboration, eliminate bottlenecks, and streamline administrative processes wherever possible. Day-to-day, healthcare providers encounter three major challenges around the flow of information and, ultimately, the flow of patients from first contact to diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.

Integrated, effective technology has the ability to help overcome these challenges – and AI-powered, highly accurate speech recognition specifically provides a single holistic solution that results in improvements across the board.

#1 The unexpected is to be expected

The nature of healthcare is that things change fast. Few of us would have predicted a devastating pandemic at the end of 2019. Recent leaps forward in AI with the likes of ChatGPT have the potential to redefine how people, including medical professionals, interact with the world around them. The NHS is also undergoing its own transformation, from a strong digital roadmap to evolving models of care like Hospital at Home.

Meanwhile, Virtual Clinics are emerging as a significant way to reduce the Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC). The NHS has begun to introduce virtual wards, allowing more people to get the care they need, in a home environment, not in hospital, which also helps to alleviate pressure. This now creates significant change in how care is delivered and how teams work with patient data.

The need for adaptability is significant. Taking radiology as an example, a study from February 2023 describes an urgent need to make radiology ‘antifragile’ – to increase resilience and adaptability, so we can thrive in an uncertain world. Some key considerations are building capacity, enabling new ways to collaborate, and prioritising information quickly and effectively.

Integrated speech recognition technology, like Augnito, helps with this challenge by empowering radiologists with more flexibility in the way they work – from transcribing reports on the go, to directly capturing information in clinical systems using speech. Speech also helps connect increasingly complex workflows across the patient journey, whether that’s in a clinical back-end, or, surfaced to other teams in different areas of the organisation. Beyond saving time for an individual healthcare professional, speech recognition transforms the availability and accuracy of clinical information. At the same time, the ability to capture information faster enables a greater degree of analysis, spotlighting the most critical information to anyone across the continuum of care.

#2 Incomplete information impairs decisions

If it wasn’t documented, it didn’t happen. That’s the reality of taking patients through journeys that are complex, often non-linear, and involve the work of multiple individuals, Trusts, private providers, and care partners. In this fast moving environment, information capture and sharing is pivotal.

• If it was just a thought, it wasn’t documented
• If it wasn’t signed off, it wasn’t documented
• It was misplaced, it wasn’t documented
• If it wasn’t saved, it wasn’t documented
• If the detail was lost, it wasn’t documented
• And if it wasn’t documented, it didn’t happen.

Wherever humans are involved in transcribing and capturing information, that information is at risk. Misplaced documents, typing errors, and incorrect data are a considerable challenge at every touchpoint. And, as information is shared across disciplines or among teams, this risk multiplies. With multiple single points of failure, a report that was accurate in the first instance misplaced or lost, affecting dozens of steps along the patient journey, with back tracking and retrieval a difficult, time-consuming task.

Healthcare has an economic and humanistic value. Gaps and failings come with financial and human impact—in some cases, irreversibly. Augnito is designed to close the gaps between medical professionals,  multiple healthcare systems, the reporting technology, and their colleagues. Interoperability is key, with speech connecting disparate systems right along the patient journey and creating a single version of the truth. With highly accurate transcription available without the delays or risks of manual handling, only then can everyone make decisions based on the full, up-to-the-minute story – with complete confidence in its accuracy and validity.

#3 Harnessing collective experience and expertise

By definition, Multi-Disciplinary Teams (MDTs) are there to provide a breadth of expertise across distinct areas, each with an important role to play in patient outcomes. But close collaboration across these teams is made more difficult when ways of working and communicating aren’t unified.

A major challenge of any new technology in healthcare is adoption – especially when considering the differing budgets of those across the health and social care system. If a new technology isn’t within reach for under-funded mental health teams or understaffed GP surgeries, its impact will always be limited.

That’s why Augnito doesn’t just provide always-available, accurate speech recognition and transcription. It’s built to be widely accessible, from the low complexity nature of a cloud-hosted solution to a simple subscription model with no need for capital expenditure or complex infrastructure changes.

Holistic improvements to how people work

Technology alone isn’t lifesaving. It’s the unique expertise and talent of people across healthcare that make better patient outcomes possible. Voice-driven AI speech recognition influences outcomes in an integrated, holistic way by focusing on the needs of the people that deliver care every day.

Developed in partnership with medical professionals, Augnito is tailored to the biggest challenges our healthcare system is facing, from rising backlogs to surging DTOC figures and a widespread bed shortage. Delivering incremental improvements to the speed, accuracy and quality of reporting and communication, Augnito brings new efficiency to everyone who touches the patient journey.

Learn more about Augnito

Augnito is already impacting the patient journey through our growing list of UK resellers and technology partners. Request an Augnito Spectra evaluation version to see its benefits first-hand.

While Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOCs), bed shortages, and needless hospital stays negatively affect every patient, the NHS still has a responsibility to pay special attention to the most vulnerable people in our society. But, given the nature of acute hospital beds and potential transfers to social care, the frail elderly and sick children make up a considerable part of the pressure that the NHS faces in handling its current backlog of more than 7 million people waiting for treatment.

In an effort to improve collaboration between disciplinary teams, the NHS has been taking steps to rectify  the specific challenge focussed on the vulnerable and . Between 2013 and 2015, 25 integrated care pioneer sites were selected by the NHS to develop and test new ways of joining up health and social care services across England. In 2015, 50 vanguards were chosen to lead the development of new care models, becoming blueprints for the wider NHS moving forward and the inspiration to the rest of the health and care system moving forward.

Through the new care models programme, a complete redesign of whole health and care systems was being considered. That care model was to take into account improving care not simply for older people, but with a focus on frailty vs. age and the differing needs of our ageing population. An ageing population that is living longer and presenting with more complex illnesses that require complicated care. At the same time, similar complexity can be found in a vulnerable group at the other end of the patient age spectrum – the young (children). These factors compound today’s NHS bed shortages, understaffing, burdened workflows, bottlenecks and burned-out clinicians and nurses. They also add to the DTOC problem.

While DTOCs can occur for a wide variety of reasons in the patient journeys of the above two mentioned vulnerable groups, data shows significant challenges in bed capacity, particularly for children. For older patients, awaiting care packages in their own home or nursing home availability are among the most common causes. Meanwhile, Multidisciplinary Teams (MDTs) have a pivotal role to play in enabling seamless journeys, without being limited by inaccurate patient reports, loss of reports, and delays in information sharing (a topic we’ll go into more detail in our next blog post).

In this post, we focus on how DTOCs affect the vulnerable most frequently and how speech recognition technology could help improve this situation to deliver a more consistently available level of care and, ultimately, improve outcomes.

Treating severely ill children

Recent data from Nuffield Trust examined the impact of NHS pressure on children, looking specifically at intensive care beds across the challenging winter period.

According to the report, December 2021 saw just 314 beds per day across the whole of England. While this was marginally higher than availability in previous winters, occupancy was higher too. On average, 89% of these beds were occupied, leaving just 35 beds available to new admissions.

This is by no means the direct consequence of DTOCs and patients failing to be transferred or discharged appropriately. But, it is a sign of a healthcare system in crisis, dealing with peak demand and increased instances of flu, scarlet fever and Strep A with little room to manoeuvre. Bed stocks have been reduced to an extent where any unexpected demand – or delay – could have disastrous consequences.

DTOCs and older patients

For older frail patients, effective care takes a seamless approach between the NHS, community services, and social care providers. It is often these cases where the discharge and transfer process is most complex, requiring collaboration between multiple parties and effectively prioritising what are often multifaceted, intricate needs.

According to a study in Age and Ageing, Volume 50, Issue 4, the average cost to the NHS of DTOCs in older patients was £820 million each year. However, the study highlights the importance of keeping patients central, even where most data gathering is focused on wasted costs.

The reality is that DTOCs aren’t just a cost centre. They create a ripple effect across our entire healthcare system – and out into the lives of patients and our wider communities. Reducing wasted costs is simple: discharge patients faster and more effectively – that’s just one part of the story.

For older patients – and patients of any age – the discharge and transfer process is a key part of their experience. Delays create distress and negatively impact healthcare outcomes. And the knock-on implications of bed shortages, soaring occupancy, and unavailability of care, tend to lower standards across the entire system.

The human cost of DTOCs and bed shortages

At the end of 2022, Landmark Chambers reported on a specific judicial review of an individual Integrated Care Board (ICB). A patient with complex physical needs and autism was stuck on a ward for 8 months when the NHS and social care bodies failed to agree on a discharge plan.

The ICB was ordered to pay the patient’s legal fees as well as their own costs – a legal bill estimated at more than £100,000. The real cost in this, and sadly many similar DTOCs isn’t financial. The real cost is to the patient: a vulnerable individual, already in a challenging environment, needlessly kept waiting for almost a year.

Look behind the scenes, and there’s also a human cost to the overworked, under-pressure MDTs based on the disjointed transfer of care process itself, providing these teams with unwieldy, often outdated reporting platforms and slow, manual processes that make efficient discharge and transfer more difficult than they need to be.

How can technology help?

Augnito’s AI speech recognition empowers all healthcare professionals to save time, increase productivity and, ultimately, reduce costs. It was created to play a part in rethinking models and workflows in healthcare, to actively improve the patient journey by making accurate, agile technology available to entire MDTs across Trusts and across primary care. The challenges the NHS continues to face are sizable, constantly evolving, and not easily solved. We believe a way for professionals to work more flexibly, cope with considerable workloads, and focus their efforts on delivering exceptional patient care will be key steps towards a solution.

Learn more about Augnito

Augnito is already impacting the patient journey through a growing list of UK resellers, distributors and technology partners.
Request an Augnito evaluation version to see its benefits first-hand.